Find Your French Town is a passion project that aims to weave together three loves of my professional life: travel, diversity, and painting.

1.  I helped my parents found the first American travel company to specialize in longer stays and vacation rentals in Europe)
2. I taught diversity (writing and delivering corporate workshops with a focus on culture) for about a decade. 
3.  I painted (mostly watercolors of French villages, like the one of Vence, below left.)

The common thread for all three?  New perspectives —  the wisdom gained from looking at the world from a different angle.  To shed one’s blinders and belong to something deeper and broader than one’s single world is one of my deepest values.  Ergo, a venture to help people who want, to retire to France. 

As I’ve neared retirement, I’ve realized that it’s not just that I  like France.  I belong in two different worlds  — the act of shifting between cultures wakes me up and makes it possible to keep growing. In every venture, I’m guided by one thought: Don’t assume you know what’s happening.  The abiding wisdom and surpassing joy of knowing you are out of your element keeps you wide awake.  Stay curious.

I have spent a good, long part of my life helping people travel independently.  Mainly all over Europe.  I’ve got a pedigree of several decades of affordable, award-winning innovative travel entrepreneurship. ( If you’d like to know more about that, you can do further reading here. )  I bring that knowledge — of how different travel-loving people can be, to this venture.

I have spent another decade in another career, writing and delivering workshops on cultural diversity in the corporate workplace.  By some freak of nature, I lucked into doing the ONE thing in corporate America I was not too weird to pull off — helping people work and communicate well with other people who come from a different background than they do.  I taught, I wrote, I taught the teachers.  I was lucky and my workshops were syndicated nationwide.  Last time I counted around 50,000 people had taken my workshops.

Throughout all those years and career changes, I painted.  If you’d like to see some of that you can find my work at marileetaussig.com.  

Braiding all that together — painting, traveling, and finding joy in adjusting to difference is what calls me now, in my seventh decade.  Many of you already know that I worked for many years in my parents’ award-winning travel business. Just a few of you may know that that business started when in 1968 my teacher dad took a sabbatical, and took me, just fourteen,  and my mom to Europe, for a year.  We lived on half a teacher’s salary —  $7500 –for a year.   Learning how to live well on modest means as an American in Europe is a lesson I started then and have never tired of.

It was then that the die was cast.  Over the years,  concerning my nationality, I became a sort of hybrid,  I am deeply American, and I am deeply something else.  When I am outside the US (usually these days nearly always in France), I miss my homeland.  When I’m in the States, I occasionally feel that I’m living someone else’s life  — that I don’t altogether belong here.

My wonderful parents have passed away, but with that long ago trip, in 1968, and their enduring curiosity and open-mindedness, they left me a wonderful inheritance – of belonging to more than one world and treasuring that very duality.   I bring that as a core value to Find Your French Town.

I seek to find others oddly inclined to multiple worlds,  who also feel themselves to be hybrid.  (To learn more about this aspect of the core values  that undergird this project, including community, affordability, and generously and that I share with my parents, check out this article in the Huffington Post, entitled “The Unmillionaire”)

I like to think of them looking down, as I try to bring this community of oddballs together, with a sense that their love of the journey lives on in their daughter  — and so many others.